About Sustainable Pittsburgh K-12 Challenge

The 2018-2019 Sustainable Pittsburgh K-12 Challenge, formerly known as the Green Workplace Challenge for K-12 Schools is open for registration. The program is a brief 18-week challenge designed for teachers and students to easily participate in sustainability actions. The program is intended to provide resources, ideas, suggestions, and lesson plans to incorporate sustainablility into student education in and out of the classroom. It's FREE to join, and the competition is open to K-12 schools of all sizes. Every action makes a difference. What difference can your school make this year?

Where do I start?

You can start by signing up for the Sustainable Pittsburgh K-12 Challenge. Teachers can find actions in the K-12 Master Playbook for themselves, classrooms, and their school to complete. Sign up by October 31, 2018 to join the competition!

Leadership: Educating students to lead the way to a sustainable future

Why 18 weeks?

In many schools, it is difficult for teachers and students to participate while school is not in session. To facilitate full access to the program, it follows the academic calendar. Schools are welcome to join the yearlong Challenge, if they wish.

How does it work?

Submitting Actions

At Sustainable Pittsburgh, we believe that every action makes a difference. That is why each action in the Sustainable Pittsburgh K-12 Challenge is rewarded with points. Each participating teacher can accumulate points for their school by completing any of the actions in the K-12 Master Playbook. Schools may have one or multiple teachers participating; there are no minimum or maximum teacher participant requirements.

Actions will be submitted through the SP Challenge website.

Actions in the K-12 Master Playbook are organized in three sections:

These actions are simple ways to create opportunity for sustainability education in the classroom. By tweaking activities as simply as switching out an example sentence, a math problem, or an essay to something related to one of the seven Sustainability Focus Areas, we begin to expose students to the sustainability ideals of simultaneously improving equity, the economy, and the environment.

The lesson plans for exercises provide a framework for teachers to bring a more specific aspect of sustainability into their classrooms. Each lesson plan has a timeframe, materials needed, approximate grade level, and a list of corresponding Common Core Standards that the lesson addresses. The lesson procedure is customizable to student and teacher needs.

Tasks and Projects: Inspiring Sustainable Lifestyles

This section is full of projects that are generally either longer-term or involve some extracurricular effort on the part of students or teachers or both. These actions have tiers of points to distinguish the steps required to bring the project to completion.

The Sustainable Pittsburgh K-12 Challenge takes seven Sustainability Focus Areas and applies them to actions in the Master Playbook. Much like the yearlong competition, the Sustainability Focus Areas for the K-12 Challenge are: Social Equity, Engagement, Air Quality, Water, Energy, Transportation, and Materials Management.

Divisions

Similar to the yearlong Sustainable Pittsburgh Challenge, schools will be placed into competitive divisions to ensure a fair and equitable comparison between schools. The divisions will be based on a combination of factors including number of teachers participating, student population, student to teacher ratio, and socio-economic range of the school zone. The Sustainable Pittsburgh Challenge team will release the competitive divisions on November 1, 2018.

Point Structure

Schools will earn points through their teachers for any new sustainability initiatives taken on during the competition. Schools can also earn points for sustainability initiatives already in place, if they are ongoing, kept up-to-date, well-maintained, and continue having impact on the students, teachers, school, and/or community. For example, one of the actions is to have students start a sustainability club. If your school already has a group of students actively involved in such a club, you may submit the existing club’s mission and recent meeting minutes to fulfill the requirements for that action.

How do I learn more?

We are happy to meet with you to help you sign up, develop your custom “game plan”, and discuss how you can engage others in your school. If you’d like us to visit your school, just contact us at challenge@sustainablepittsburgh.org or 412-258-6642. You can also review the Sustainable Pittsburgh K-12 Master Playbook for more information.